Those who are not afraid to
take the bull by the balls, when he's dead

Those who've grown bald on
the inside of their heads

Those who give their
blessings to all the churning masses

Those who distribute the kick
in the asses

Those who prop up the dead
with their great regret

Those who use bayonet

Those who let their children
play with guns

Those who let guns play with
their children

Those who float and refuse to
ever sink

Those who believe the best of
all mankind, though here and there some few may stink

Those whose gigantic wings
alone prevent them from superhuman flight

Those whose only dream is
sticking pieces of broken bottle on the top of the Great Wall of China at
midnight

Those who cover up their faces
in wolves-heads when chewing on a lamb chop

Those who make off with the
eggs but refuse to take the responsibility for whipping up the omelette

Those who own four thousand
eight hundred and ten square yards of Mount Blanc, three hundred of the Eiffel Tower,
twenty-five centimeters of chest expansion and what's more, those who are proud
of it

Those who suckle at the bosom
of a nation

those who do the running, the
raiding, and the revenging on our behalf, the whole mob of them, and a lot more
besides, who proudly enter the President's Residence, crunching along the
gravel road, all pushing and shoving, all hurrying each other along, because
there is going to be a great banquet of heads right now and everyone can choose
the head that best fits his or her taste.

One head the head of a clay
pipe, the other the head of an English Admiral; as a side dish there are heads
made out of bombs, the heads of Galliffet, the heads of gentle beasts with bad
headaches, Auguste Comte-heads, Rouget de Lisle heads, Saint Theresa-heads,
heads made out of heads of headcheese, even heads of feet, heads of men of the
cloth, milkmen heads. Some of them, just for a laugh, carried on their
shoulders delightful little calf-faces, and these faces were so lovely and so
sad-with little sprigs of parsley sticking out of their ears like seaweed
sprouting from the reefs deep beneath the seas-that nobody even noticed them.

A mother wearing a dead
skull's head smilingly presented her daughter wearing an orphan's head to the
venerable old diplomat friend of the family who had on the head of Soleilland.

It was truly deliciously
charming and all in such perfect taste that when the President arrived wearing
an overstuffed Columbus-egg head everybody went absolutely crazy.

"Actually, the idea was
quite simple; the whole trick was in being the first to think of it,"
announced the President unfolding his napkin; and before the spectacle of so
much simplicity and malice the guests could no longer overcome their emotions:
through the cardboard crocodile-eyes a fat factory owner let flow a few tears
of uncontrollable joy, a slightly smaller industrialist nibbled on the table
legs, all the pretty ladies jiggled their tits a bit and the Admiral, carried
away by his own enthusiasm, tipped his champagne glass in the wrong direction,
broke off the stem in doing so, and died of a ruptured appendix just standing
there, feet locked on the arms of his chair, shrieking: "Women and
children first"

By strange coincidence, the
seafarer's widow-on the advice of her maid-had that very morning concocted a
striking war-widow's head, with two long lines of pain running down from either
side of the mouth part, and two neat little pockets of grief, touches of gray
beneath blue eyes.

Standing on the seat of her
chair, she addresses the President, howling at the top of her lungs to demand
increases in war-widows' pensions and the right to wear as a brooch, crosswise
on her bosom of her evening gown, the deceased's favourite sextant.

Finally, slightly calmer now,
she lets her lonely widow's gaze wander over the table, and, spying among the
hor d'oeuvres a plate of filets of herring, sobbing, she gobbles down several,
one after another, like a machine; then she swallows up the rest, in the memory
of the Admiral who "seldom indulged himself during his long
lifetime," but who "nevertheless did love them so very much."
Interruption: The Minister of Protocol is requesting that everyone stop eating,
since the President is about to speak.

The President has arisen, you
can see that he's just broken the top of his cranial egg with his knife because
he prefers it a bit less warm, only just a modicum less warm...

Now he is speaking and the
silence is suddenly such that you can hear the flies in flight and suddenly
such that you can hear them flying so distinctly that you can't hear the
President speaking anymore which is really quite regrettable because it's
specifically about flies he's speaking, about flies and their incontestable
usefulness in every area of life and the realm of colonial activities in
particular.

"...For without flies,
we would be without fly-swatters, without fly-swatters there would be no
Governor-General of Algiers, no French Consulate...no insults to revenge, no
olive-trees, in fact no more Algeria, which means no more hot spells,
Gentlemen, and those bracing heat waves in the desert, Gentlemen, aren't they
the very health of the weary traveler, and besides..."

But when the flies become
bored they die, and all the stories of past glories, all these statistics of
ours fill them with the full weight of sadness, so that first they lower one
foot from the ceiling, then the next and then they fall, as flies will do, in
our dinner plates...all over our clean white shirt-fronts, dead as the songs
say.

"The most noble conquest
of man is the horse," the President was announcing, "and were there
but one horse left in the entire world, I would want to be him."

The speech is over; and like
an overripe orange flung against a wall with all his might by a badly
brought-up child, the Marseillaise explodes and the entire audience, dazzled by
the stunning brilliance bouncing off the copper band instruments, rises as one
to its feet, choked up, drunken, just at the thought of the history of France
and that of the illustrious Pontet-Canet.

Everyone is standing, except
for the man with the head of Rouget deLisle who takes all this in his stride
and who is of the opinion that the performance was well executed indeed and
then, gradually, the music dies down and then the next thing you know the mother
with the corpse-head has taken advantage of this peaceful moment to push her
little orphan-headed daughter toward the President's table.

Flowers in her hand, the
child begins her memorized speech: "Monsieur President, Sir..." But
her emotions, plus the heat, plus the flies are such that she keels over and
falls with her face flat in the flowers, teeth snapped tight as the jaws on a
pair of nail-clippers.

The man with the head made
out of a truss and the man with the head completely formed from an abscess fling
themselves forth, and the little thing is borne up, subjected to an autopsy,
and disowned by her mother who discovered on the child's card listing
dancing-partners certain poodles of an unspeakable obscenity-wouldn't even
dream for a single moment that the one who had amused himself that way was the
family's dear old diplomat friend upon whom the father's job depends.

Concealing the paper in her
dress, she stabs at her bosom with a stub of white chalk while giving out a
loud shriek and her grief is painful to behold for all those who think that
this is the genuine article, the actual grief of a mother just deprived of her
child.

Delighted to be the center of
attention, she lets herself go, she really lets them have it, she moans and
groans, singing out: "Where oh where is my little daughter, oh where oh
where can she be/who threw grass to the rabbits, and rabbits to the
dogs..."

But the President, whose
first experience with a lost child this is certainly not, makes a certain
practiced gesture with his hand, and the banquet goes on.

And those who had come to
peddle coal and wheat peddle coal and wheat and also certain large green
islands entirely surrounded by water; lush lands with pneumatic trees and metal
pianos exquisitely crafted so that your ears need not be assaulted by the
outcries of the natives around the plantations when the good-natured fun-loving
colonialists go for target practice after dinner.

With one bird on his
shoulder, another inside his pants so he can prepare roast fowl while he waits,
sits the oddest duck of all, at whose house later on the poets would go,
talking of Michael Angelo.

"This is really,"
one was saying to another, "I mean really quite a success."

But then, in the glare of a
spotlight, the Minister of Protocol is caught in flagrante delecto, eating a
plate of chocolate ice-cream with a coffee-spoon.

"That there should be no
special spoon for chocolate ice-cream is insane when you stop to think about
it," the Governor was saying, "it's unimaginable in fact-after all,
the dentist has his drills, the paper its proper scissors, and even red
radishes, as opposed to white, have their appropriate radish dish."

But suddenly everyone starts
to tremble with fear, because a man wearing a mans head just entered, a man
nobody there seems to have invited and who sets down atop the table, in a
basket, the head of Louis the Sixteenth.

It's really the horror of
horrors: its teeth, the old men and the doors all chatter with fear.

"Were done for, they've
done in the locksmith," screamed the burghers of Calais in their shirts
all gray as Cap Gris-Nez, as they slid away down the banisters.

The overwhelming terror, the
tumult, the feeling of despair, the straw that broke the camel's back, the
state of siege and outside, in full-dress uniform, with blackened hands beneath
white gloves, the sentry who sees blood gushing forth from the gutters and a
bug in his tunic realizes events have taken a turn for the worse and that now
it's time to go, while the going's still good.

"I had intended,"
announces a smiling man, "to bring you the ashes of the royal family, who
are rumoured to be buried in the 'Caucasian Vault' somewhere beneath the Rue
Pigalle, but those crazy Cassacks who keep weeping and sighing over there,
dancing the Kazatsky and buying each other drinks, keep quite a close watch
over all the dead men they protect.

"Still, you can't have
everything, I'm no Ruy Blas, nor am I Cagliostro, I'm no crystal ball, I'm no
mess of coffee grounds. No, I'm not one to keep a collection of prophets'
beards in cotton wadding. Certainly, I love an occasional laugh with a few
friends, but I'm speaking here for the shut-ins, I monologue for the
long-shoremen, I broadcast for the magnificent idiots in the suburbs and it's
only by accident that I'm paying a visit to your little world.

"First to say, 'Oh cut
the crap! Is as good as dead. But you're all silent-too bad, I was kidding all
along.

"Yes, you have a little
laughter in your life so if you want, I'll take you on a guided tour into the
heart of town but of course I realize that you're a little afraid of traveling,
you know what you know, which is to say that the Tower of Pisa is crooked and
that vertigo overcomes a man when he leans over for a look. Yes, that applies
to you over there on the terraces of those cafe's.

"Still, you'd have a
good time for yourself, just like the President when he goes down to inspect a
mine, just like Rudolf down at the tavern when he sits around with the local
cut-throat, just like it was when you were but a child and they took you to the
Municipal Zoo for a look at the great Anteater.

"You'd have been able to
see beggars with no skid row, lepers without begging bowls and shirtless men
stretched out along the benches, stretched out abbreviatedly, however, in view
of the fact that it's illegal.

"You'd have seen men in
flophouses making the sign of the cross in exchange for a bed and families with
eight children in a 'one-room dwelling' and-if you'd really behaved yourself,
you'd have had the opportunity and the privilege of seeing this: The father who
arises with a case of shakes, the mother expiring with worry over the last of
her babies, the surviving members of the family escaping on the run and taking
a blood-covered road to escape the pain.

"You just must see
believe me, it's a sight for sore eyes-you just must behold the moment when the
Good Shepherd leads his sheep to the slaughterhouse, the moment when the eldest
son with a resigned sigh throws in his lot with the junkies, the moment when
children bored to tears switch beds in their room, you just absolutely must see
the man lying in his bed surrounded by it's bars just as the alarm-clock is
preparing itself to go off in his ear.

"Look at him now, listen
to that snoring, he's dreaming, he's dreaming he's going on a long journey, dreaming
that everything is going smoothly, that he has a reserved seat in a private
compartment... but the hand on the clock collides with the light on the train
and the awakened man soaks his head in a sink full of cold water if it's
winter-or hot water, if it's summer.

"Look at him hurrying
along, gulping down his morning coffee, entering the shop for work, except that
he's still not awake, the alarm didn't ring loudly enough or the coffee wasn't
strong enough, he's still dreaming that a comfy place on the train is waiting
for him, except that he leans out a little too far and falls headfirst into a
garden, then tumbles straight into a cemetery, awakes and screams like a bloody
animal, two fingers are missing, the machine tried to eat him alive but he wasn't
hired to dream away the day, was he, and just the way you're thinking now-he
got what he deserved.

"You're thinking also
that after all a thing like that doesn't happen too often and that one swallow
doesn't make a spring or anything, you're logic-king it out that an earth quake
in New Guinea can't stop the grapes from growing in the province, much less
cheeses from aging or the earth itself from turning.

"But I wasn't asking you
to logic; I was asking you to look, to listen, to accustom yourself, so as not
to be too surprised when you hear your cue-ball brains breaking open when the
elephants come around, looking to take back their ivory.

"Because this half-dead
head of yours, the one you keep mostly buried under dead cardboard, these
bleached brains behind their amusing pasteboard masks, this head with all it's
lines and wrinkles, with all its practiced grimaces-some day with all your
detachment you'll shake this head clean off its little connecting link, and as
it goes tumbling off, rolling away in the sawdust, you won't even cry out,
won't even cry out yes, it's O.K.!; much less no.

"And if it actually
isn't your very own, it will be one of your friends' heads, because you know
the old tales well enough, with there shepherds and their dogs; no, as far as
having a really good, solid head on your shoulders, you needn't be the ones to
worry...

"I'm still kidding, of
course, but after all, as people say, a butterfly's wings are enough to change
the course of human history. A little guncotton instead of surgical cotton in
the ear of an ailing King and couldn't the King himself just explode... the
Queen rushes to his bedside, but there is no more bedside anymore: there is no
more palace anymore. All there is, is in ruins, and draped in mourning. The
Queen feels her mind going. To relax her a bit, a stranger with a nice smile
gives her a cup of strong coffee. The Queen drinks it, the Queen dies from it,
and the servants begin pasting labels on the children's luggage. The man with
the nice smile returns, opens the largest trunk, shoves all the little princes
inside, snaps the padlock on the trunk, checks the trunk at the baggage-room at
the station and walks off rubbing his hands.

"And when I speak,
Monsieur le President, Mesdames, Messieurs, of the 'the King, the Queen, and
the little Princes,' you understand of course that it's only to disguise things
a little, since you can't logically blame regicides who haven't a King around
if they make use of their talents with respect to those in the immediate
environs, can you?

"Particularly that is
with respect to people who think that a handful of rice is more than enough to
keep a family of oriental peons going for eons.

"Or with respect to
people who snicker at International World's Fairs because a black women is
carrying a black child on her back just the way they've been carrying in their
white insides a pale-as-death white child for six or seven months.

"Or with respect to
30,000 reasonable people actually supposed to consist of both a body and a soul
who march to the rally on the sixth of March in Brussels, military music
leading them on, parading before the statue erected to the memory of the
self-sacrificing Carrier-Pigeon Soldier and with respect to those who will
march tomorrow in places, with names like Brave-the-Dauntless, Rose-the
Rosy-Cheeks, or Carpa-the-Jewess before the monument' to the innocent young
sailor-teenager who died in the war as a representative symbol of..."

But a coffeepot thrown from
some distance by an indignant our-strength-is-in-might advocate lands on the
head of the man who was telling a group of people how useful a sense of humour
can sometimes be. He falls flat. The Soldier-Pigeon is revenged. The official
cardboard-heads trample the head of the smiling man with a rain of kicks, and
the young woman, I mean the one over there dipping the tip of her umbrella into
the blood for a souvenir, bursts into a tiny tinkle of laughter. The music
begins again.

The head of the man is all
red now, like an overripe tomato, one eye dangles at the end of a single vein,
but all over the demolished face, the remaining living eye-the left one-goes on
beaming like a flashlight in the ruins.

"Transport him
hence," says the President; and the man, who is outstretched on a
stretcher with his face covered by a police-captain's raincoat, marches off
horizontally out of the President's Residence, one man in front of him, another
close behind.

"You have to have a good
laugh now and then, don't you?" he mumbles to the sentry on duty at the
door and the sentry watches him being carried away with the same stunned
expression you sometimes see a good man adopt when faced with the presence of
pure malignancy.

But now, penetrating the
shutters before the plate-glass windows of the pharmacie shines a bright star
of hope and, like wise men who fail to recognize Christ Jesus when they see
him, all the butcher-boys, itinerant bed-linen salesmen and other men of good
will observe the star which tells them that the man they saw inside, that the
man isn't quite dead yet, that perhaps they are about to nurse him back to
health back in there; and so everyone awaits his re-emergence, in the hope of
doing him in once and for all.

They wait; and soon, on all
fours because of the narrowness of the opening below the shutters, the chief
magistrate creeps into the little shop, the druggist helps him to his feet and
shows him the supposed dead man, head propped up on a baby-scale.

And the judge demands to
know, and the druggist looks at the judge in return, wondering whether this
isn't actually the very same joker who threw confetti on that General's coffin
a little while ago and who, even earlier than that, planted the time bomb in
Napoleon's path.

And then they chit-chat about
this and that, about their children, and their various coughs and colds; day
breaks and the curtains are drawn back at the President's Residence.

Outside, it's spring, with
animals, with flowers, and in the nearby park one can hear the sound of
children's laughter; yes, it's spring all right, the needle goes crazy in the
compass, the metal flange scampers about beneath the drill- press, and the
magnificent dolichocephalic once more falls on her ass on the chaise lounge and
plays the fool.

It's getting warmer now. It's
spring, with lovers like safety matches rubbing each other a little along their
striking surfaces, with adolescent acne cases on the increase; and here we have
the sultan's daughter and the mandrake-root reader, here we have pelicans, the
most beautiful season of the year is upon us.

The sun shines for all mankind,
except of course for prisoners and miners, and also for-

those who scale fish

those who eat the spoiled
meat

those who turn out hairpin
after hairpin

those who blow glass bottles
that others will drink from

those who slice their bread
with pocketknives

those who vacation at their
workbenches or their desks

those who never quite know
what to say

those who milk your cows yet
who never drink their milk

those you won't find
anesthetized at the dentist's

those who cough out their
lungs in the subway

those who down in various
holes turn out the pens with which others in the open air will write something
to the effect that everything turns out for the best

those whose labours are never
over

those who haven't labours

those who water your horses

those who watch their own
dogs dying

those whose daily bread is
available on a more or less weekly schedule

those who go to church to
keep warm in their winter

those whom Swiss Guards send
outdoors to keep warm

those who simply rot

those who enjoy the luxury of
eating

those who travel beneath your
wheels

those who stare at the Seine
flowing by

those whom you hire, to who
you express your deepest thanks, whom you are charitable toward, whom you
deprive, whom you manipulate, whom you step on .whom you crush

those from whom even
fingerprints are taken

those whom you order to break
ranks at random and shoot down quite methodically

those who go on forced
marches beneath the Arch of Triumph

those who don't know how to
fall in with the custom of the country or any place on earth

those who never see the sea

those who always smell of
fresh linen because they weave the sheets you lie on

those without running water

those whose goal is eternally
the blue horizon

those who scatter salt on the
snow in all directions in order to collect a ridiculous salary

those whose life expectancy
is a lot shorter than yours is

those who die of boredom on
Sunday afternoon because they see Monday morning coming and also Tuesday and
Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday too and the next Sunday afternoon
as well.

About Me

I'm a semi-retired musician/entertainer who creates and performs his/her own music, writer, artist, painter, photographer, mathematician and I’m into making movies with high def video cameras. My taste in music is eclectic I listen to and can play most contemporary genres.
Before my musical career I’ve been an RN, phlebotomist, and was successful in a number of blue collar professions. I have several college degrees but mastered in mathematics. Also I'm very into computer science and the Internet. I’m a voracious reader, reading about two nonfiction books a week.
My goal for 2015 is to create a solid presence for both me and my works on the internet.
Personally I’m extremely atypical with a strong sense of self. I also have a genuine mind-set regarding the human condition. I don’t hate but rather feel love for everything except for humanities inhumanity it seems for every existing thing on the planet.
At this time I’m searching ubiquitously for my soul mate.
I hope that this epistle finds you and yours both healthy and in high spirits.
Cheers,
Adrian Alexis